No Glory

By Robert Wilson

Published: August 2, 1998

THE BLACK FLOWER

A Novel of the Civil War.

By Howard Bahr.

267 pp. New York:

Owl/Henry Holt & Company. Paper, $12.

HOWARD BAHR'S first novel was published in hardcover last year by a small press in Baltimore, but despite being nominated for several awards it escaped the attention of most reviewers and readers. Now appearing in paperback, it's being republished as if it were new. The success of ''Cold Mountain'' certainly has something to do with this, since ''The Black Flower,'' like that surprising best seller, is, as its subtitle reminds us, ''A Novel of the Civil War.'' Let me promise right now not to compare Bahr's bold effort with ''The Red Badge of Courage,'' ''The Killer Angels,'' the film ''Glory'' or a certain public television documentary. Forget Margaret Mitchell, Shelby Foote and even Charles Frazier. Bahr's novel is too eccentric and too uneven to support such comparisons. And at moments it's almost too good to support them.

''The Black Flower'' follows a group of Confederate soldiers from Cumberland, Miss., into battle at Franklin, Tenn., on the last day of November 1864. Although Bahr sometimes goes back and forth in time, the swift pace of this fairly short book keeps him moving chronologically through a period of about two days. His characters immediately confront ''the black flower'' (as, we are told, Hawthorne called death) when they begin their assault across a broad plain on an entrenched Federal line. The rest of the book takes place after the battle at a plantation house that has been turned into a field hospital.

Pvt. Bushrod Carter, a graduate of the University of Mississippi and ''a veteran of all the campaigns of the Army of Tennessee since Shiloh,'' has survived with his comrades to this late stage of the war. His brigade began as the Cumberland Rifles, but all that remains of his fellow townsmen are his friend Jack Bishop, three of their officers, a chaplain and a member of the band who believes himself to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. By the end of the book, even this list is sadly diminished.

One reason Bahr's novel doesn't compare well with earlier books is that it has a post-Vietnam ferocity about it. You might expect blood and guts in a Civil War novel, but here are the actual gray, ropy entrails, the smell of corpses lying in the fields. You might expect a disquisition on the chaos and futility of battle, but Bahr also insists on its grotesque malignity.

Vietnam gave us not just a tolerance for the grossest details of warfare but a firm sense that these details are the proper antidote to any lingering tendency to glorify war. In this sense, ''The Black Flower'' is a deeply moral book, its perspective clear from the moment a bumbling comrade discharges his rifle (and its ramrod) into the skull of one of Bushrod's ''pards'' until the next day, when the dead man's rigid arms must be broken so he'll fit into a grave. Bahr can only bring his own historical perspective to this material, but the cynicism of his characters feels anachronistic, as if the remnants of the Army of Tennessee were wreathed in marijuana smoke at firebases in the Central Highlands.

The book has other problems, including a tendency to swerve into melodrama. On the stairs of the mansion, a young woman brusquely confronts a man who turns out to be Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. He treats her with stereotypical courtesy, bestowing an ostrich feather plucked from his hat and telling her (in a sample of Bahr's frequently problematic dialogue) that ''there ain't any shame in bein afraid. Not ever.'' It's a remark his soldiers would have responded to with rude sounds.

In contrast to these sorts of scenes is a set piece of startling originality, a three-page description of a wasp's freeing itself from a pool of blood on the floor of the plantation house, slowly climbing the wounded Bushrod's body, then launching itself from the bridge of his nose. ''He flew in perfect linear flight to the lantern again and began to knock his head against the glass. Tink. Tink. Tink. After a while he fell, straight down, like a dropped match.''